


Wasteland

by hollyandvice (hiasobi_writes)



Series: Holly's Round Nine H/C Bingo Card [2]
Category: Rent - Larson
Genre: Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 03:45:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15015959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiasobi_writes/pseuds/hollyandvice
Summary: It's not that Collins had ever found New York to be a particularly spectacular place. It had been a place to live, a place to eat and drink and sleep and breathe, but it wasn't anything particularly spectacular.Collins ruminates on the before, the during, and the after of his time with Angel.





	Wasteland

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'ed. Part of my Round Nine H/C Bingo Card. Pseudo flash fiction; apologies for the quality.

It's not that Collins had ever found New York to be a particularly spectacular place. It had been a place to live, a place to eat and drink and sleep and breathe, but it wasn't anything particularly spectacular. Glass and concrete forming the sheer faces of manmade cliffs, lining the canyons carved by humanity in defiance of the world they inhabit. It's nothing special, but it's a place to be, and, for a while, that had been enough. And then.

And then Angel had walked into his life, everything her name implied, and that, somehow, changed everything. Suddenly the world was a little brighter, a little warmer, a little kinder, just for her being in it. It wasn't revolutionary, wasn't life-changing, wasn't earth-shattering, but it was. It was different. And at first, that was all that mattered.

He'd walked in her shadow — they all had — and that, somehow, had been enough. She'd stood tall and strong and brave and loved them all the same for their smallness in the face of her greatness. She'd loved them all the same, save for Collins, who she'd loved fiercely and unerringly and that had changed him. Little by little, bit by bit, she had changed him. Her love wasn't revolutionary, the way he'd always tried to act on campus. Her love wasn't life-changing, the way he'd always tried to change his students' lives. Her love wasn't earth-shattering, the way he'd always tried to change the world. Her love just was, in the way the air and the earth are, present and whole and uncompromising. She'd welcomed him into her life, into her bed, and they had loved each other as fiercely as two humans could with their lives on the line. And then.

And then she was gone.

It wasn't until she was gone that he'd really understood just how revolutionary, just how life-changing, just how earth-shattering her love had been. Revolutionary in its endlessness. Life-changing in its consistency. Earth-shattering in its simple existence. She was everything he'd never known he needed, everything he'd never known he wanted, and to have her only to lose her—

It feels too cruel.

Without Angel, New York feels a little dimmer. Without Angel, New York looks like little more than a barren wasteland, glass and metal and unforgiving once again. Without Angel, New York is what it was before, a place to exist without living and without loving. Without Angel, living aches in a way he'd forgotten it could, even after so brief a time with her beside him. Without Angel, there doesn't seem to be much left of him.

But he knows she wouldn't appreciate him using the loss of her as a reason to back down, to step away, to be anything less than the man she'd helped him remember he could be. So he goes through the motions, does what he knows how to do, does the things that make him better and keep him alive. It isn't always enough, but it keeps him alive. It keeps him alive, and maybe one day it will be enough to let him thrive. Until then, he won't do her the disservice of dying too soon.

She loved him too much for that.

**Author's Note:**

> [Come hang with me on tumblr!](http://hollyandvice.tumblr.com/)


End file.
